David Baltimore
The Power List 2018 – Masters of the Bench
David Baltimore
President Emeritus and Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology, California Institute of Technology
David Baltimore’s love for research was born after spending a summer seeing scientists at work at the Jackson Laboratory in 1955. Since then, his achievements include a National medal of Science and a Nobel Prize in 1975 for the discovery of reverse transcriptase, which implied that cancer could be caused by genetic means – a wide-open question at the time. He has played a significant role in the development of biotechnology since the 1970s.